Mr. Pinkerton makes an excellent point regarding plastic-coned designs
and what he phrases "internal lossiness" at low listening levels. This
raises an interesting question regarding older versus newer Spendor and
Harbeth speakers.

My questions: Spendor's BC1's are still considered very good speakers
and seem to have almost a "cult" following, with a very active Yahoo
group dedicated to them.

(1) Do many of you consider Spendor's newer SP-100 speakers to be less
lossy or more lossy than the classic BC1's? Are the SP-100's a
significant step forward over the BC1?

(2) And is Harbeth's "radial" plastic composite cone an improvement over
the poly cones of the SP-100, or just a different design approach with a
different sounding result?

IMHO, most of the Spendors and Harbeth's I've listened to were far
superior in low-level sound quality to many of the poly coned American
(and some UK) speakers of this time period cited by Mr. Pinkerton, such
as many of the Infinity and Mission brand models that touted the use of
poly cones in their ads.

I would argue that not all poly coned speakers are the same: As in any
audio endeavour, some were well-designed and are still considered
classics (BC1) while others (Infinity, for example) should never have
seen the light of day.

Stewart Pinkerton wrote:
On 28 Nov 2003 05:34:40 GMT, Bromo wrote:


Another thought occurred to me: A good litmus test of a setup is the
ability to be drawn into the music at moderate volumes (~80dB or less). I
think some reviewers call it "unfatiguing" and "musicality" - but whatever
it is called - systems like that might hold some clues to this enigma.


That's a very good point. One of my critical tests of any speaker is
to play it very quietly. Does the detail still sparkle? Alas, with
many '80s and '90s plastic-coned designs, the answer is no - there
seems to be some kind of internal lossiness that squeezes the life out
of the sound at low levels.

This seems to be much less of a problem with modern composite and
metal coned speakers, and IME not a problem at all with large planars
such as Quad.